THE NEW YOR.KER. Once, there was a special excitement about recordings of "live" perfor- mances; today, we hear some less than lively "live" performances-perfor- mances chilled to studio conscientious- ness by foreknowledge that the event must double as a recording session. E IGHT years ago, the Early Music Institute of Indiana University gave a startling, potent realization of a Passion play from the Carmina Burana manuscript. It was reconstructed by Thomas Binkley and staged by Ross Allen; first performed in Bloomington, it was then brought to the Cloisters. The Berkeley "Carmina Burana," re- constructed and directed by Mr. Bink- ley, was a looser, sacred-and-secular anthology: "The action takes place in the courtyard of a monastery. Monks, students, and neighbors are gathered in the courtyard where they entertain each other with song, dance, and dra- ma." When the crowd becomes rowdy, an Abbot breaks in with "Silete," and a sacred scene is presented. The sing- ing of the Kitka Eastern European Women's Vocal Ensemble, an Oak- land-based group, was tangy, excel- lently in tune, and verbally communi- cative. The singing of Boni Angeli, a Stanford-based male-voice ensemble, was cultivated. Karen Clark Young, the Mary of the Bloomington Passion, was again outstanding in her fearless, affecting account of the Virgin's planctus, and also as the angel who banishes Adam and Eve from Paradise. But the dramatic enactment had the gaucherie of an end-of-term school pageant. T HE American Music Theatre Festival, in Philadelphia, ended last month with what should have been an important revival: of "Love Life," the most ambitious of Kurt Weill's Broadway works. It was composed in 1947-48, after "Street Scene" and be- fore "Lost in the Stars." The librettist was Alan Jay Lerner, fresh from "Brigadoon." The show opened on Broadway (after New Haven and Bos- ton tryouts) in October, 1948. It was staged by Elia Kazan and designed by Boris Aronson; Nanette Fabray and Ray Middleton were the principals; Sylvia Stahlman, later a fine Handel singer and the sparky Oscar of Solti's first "Ballo" recording, had the small coloratura part of Miss Ideal Man. "Love Life" closed after just over two hundred and fifty performances. An ASCAP strike prevented an original-cast recording. Eight of the songs were published in summary sheet-music form. Some of the songs have been recorded, out of context. So, although "Love Life" is famous as the first "concept musical," with techniques that anticipate those of "Trouble in Tahiti," "Cabaret," "Chicago," "Company," it has remained largely unknown It was revived at the U ni- versity of Michigan three years ago, and I discovered the piece from a tape of that stylish show: its cond uctor , Mitchell Krieger, has a fine sense of tempo, rhythm, and instrumental vi- vacity; a talented young cast projects Lerner's words admirably. "Love Life" was termed a vaude- ville. It traces an American marriage from 1791 to 1948, setting each scene in a new era and moving from May- ville, Connecticut, to modern Manhat- tan. David Drew, in his Weill cata- logue, says: Developments on the personal level can thus be shown as consequences or reflec- tions of those on the social and economic levels. When Susan and Sam Cooper first set up home in the New England of 1791, their values are those of the close-knit, hard-working, and God-fearing community to which they belong. The disruption of that multiple harmony begins with the transition from a rural to an industrial economy. It continues, stage by stage and era by era, unti1 the mid-twentieth century finds Susan and Sam divorced, alienated, and seemingly blind to the realities of their own situation and that of the society to whose opportunism and vulgar materialism both have surrendered. The scenes of the domestic drama are punctuated by vaudeville acts, with ti- tles like "Progress" and "Economics." They are satirical and entertaining, but "the very nature of the song-and-dance routines involves the vaudevillians in the social and market forces they decry; for theirs is the voice of popular cul- ture, and the debasement of that culture is part of the story." In the last scene, a minstrel show, Sam and Susan join with the vaudevillians and become the stars of the final turn as, advancing from opposite ends of a tightrope, still loving, they make a precarious attempt to reach one another again. It is all a long way from "Oklaho- ma!" and "Annie Get Your Gun." "Love Life" walked tightropes of its own. Weill's score moves from the easy, folksy charm of the early scenes (his folk opera "Down in the Valley" was composed during a lull in work on 75 _ c. 0$<' -0..-, . i:" \, \ . "..:, d. . )<" .-.. '. -':.:t',\-:,. . Leonard R. Judd, President & C.O.O. 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